DIY kit computer goes Forth against Braben's RaspberryPi

Elite developer David Braben's RaspberryPi may have generated headlines aplenty, but it's not the first 1980s-style teach-yourself-programming gadget, one Reg reader insists.

Step forward Julian Skidmore, developer and seller of FIGnition, a 20 quid DIY "retro computer built with modern parts... designed to be built by its users, coded - it boots into its programming language - and understood".

"The key thing to producing programmers in kids is that you need ridiculously simple computers, with Kilobytes of memory and relatively modest performance," says Skidmore.